The Girl Who Fell Through the Ice

In the movie that is my life, Buratino is played by Haley Joel Osment in a plaid shirt and prosthetic nose. I am Kevin Costner as he exists in Dances with Wolves. Just as I am teaching my new lovers to make the white man talk, Haley Joel rides into camp on a World War II motorcycle. Everyone reacts badly and for a while it looks like Haley’s going to do something stupid until I manage to buy him off with a set of Richard Nixon’s golf clubs. I’m not used to such forced diplomacy, but I promise Stands With A Fist that I will return before the harvest.

We make a plan that I will pretend to be him and he will hide in the mausoleum. We will be twins.

We ride for three or four hours, following the river until the land flattens out and the air is colder. When Haley stops the bike the earth is hard underfoot. The river has become a lake and the lake is frozen. There is a layer of snow on the ice. We walk to the edge. Ignoring the crude warning signs, Haley stretches one foot onto the thin surface. He anchors himself by grabbing my forearm. “Haven’t you ever wondered?” he says as I try to pull him back. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like?”

—

I am born in the St. Helier hospital on the southern outskirts of Greater London. At the age of five, I am placed in St. Anthony’s Convent School, one hundred twenty miles west of the city. This is where I meet Buratino.

The first day, in the playground, he tells me he was born with an extra finger on each hand, removed by himself with catgut and a sharp knife. Months later, in the copse behind the mausoleum, he takes the knife from his satchel. He does not bleed as I slide the blade across his palm. I am afraid and jerk my hand away when he tries to draw blood from mine.

In chapel the next morning, Father Selwyn marks our foreheads with an ashen cross. He tells us, “Remember…remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” Buratino looks across at me as we kneel at the rail. We chant a prayer and process out behind Sister Josephine, through the oak doors and across the playground. In the classroom we are told of The Lives of the Saints and instructed to assemble our own communion. My favorite is Saint Francis. I learn his prayer by heart and resolve to a life of asceticism and veterinary science: an instrument of peace, in dying born to eternal life.

—

To mark the end of the twentieth century, the city of London chose to erect a large Ferris wheel on the South Bank, along with an enigmatic tent-like structure that turned out to be only a large auditorium. As midnight struck, it was planned that through a system of pyrotechnics, the river itself would be set ablaze. Something went wrong. The materials failed to ignite and the city had to make do with the not insubstantial fireworks.

At this interlude, time found the apparatus for some curious gymnastics. That is, the twenty-first century appeared with both proximity and distance. There it was, malfunctions aside, prodigal and indifferent, yet all of its perceived hallmarks were markedly absent. I remember sitting with Buratino on a hillside in the mud, unaware that we were growing into a decade of paranoia, attrition, and exploding skyscrapers. Unaware that fewer than two years earlier, the skeleton of a four-year-old child with attributes of both Neanderthals and modern humans had been found in Portugal. Unaware that Buratino had begun to understand the world as an interconnected system of events, a sequence of intensities he could manipulate and exhaust.

—

In terms of solid, liquid and gas, I do not understand fire. It is a plasma? What is a plasma?

I am fifteen when the convent school sends me to Switzerland to board with a priest and his elderly wife. The house is adjacent to an elementary school that rings in its classes with a digital bell. This makes it hard to sleep during the daytime, which is unfortunate because I stay up most of the night watching the calendar as if it were a television, imagining stories that I will tell to Buratino once I return.

In the afternoons I walk around the city, take the trolley to the lake. There is a place I like to walk called Needle Park, where the public lavatories are lit by blue bulbs. They make it difficult to find your veins. In my room, on the top floor of the priest’s house, I read a book that has German on the left and an English translation on the right. It is supposed to improve my language skills, but I ignore the German. It is a story about a woman with pale skin and tiny scars all over her face and arms. I look for the woman in the park. I take a boat onto the lake. I ride the trolley in circles until it shuts down for the night and I walk the six miles home through the city.

—

We make a plan that I will pretend to be him and he will hide in the mausoleum. We will be twins. Buratino has found a book that says Jesus had a twin named Thomas. I ask Sister Josephine if this is true and she gives me cook’s duty for the next seven days. At the end of the week I have to scrub the corner of the playground where everyone writes bad words with chalk. Fuck, shit, piss, wank; I scrub them all from the asphalt.

—

Shinichi Fujimura: an amateur archaeologist. In the years before the new century, he establishes a reputation through his miraculous knack for discovery. It earns him the nickname “God’s hand.” Based on his findings, textbooks are rewritten, historical epochs are extended. Each dig reveals older and older artifacts until his discoveries are estimated to be over half a million years old.

Within weeks, photographs that show Fujimura burying these same artifacts the day before they are found are made public. He holds a press conference, confesses, and apologizes. Of all his discoveries over the last thirty years, only four are legit. “It is the work of an evil demon,” he says. A case of possession.

Months later, university professor Mitsuo Kagawa is linked to the hoax in a series of three magazine articles. Less than a week before the third article is published, Kagawa hangs himself at his home in Hinode. He is found by his wife, Toshiko, along with three separate suicide notes, one of which addresses the hoax directly. “I am not guilty of any wrongdoing…I would like my death to be a sign of protest.”

Richard Froude’s recent writing can be found in Birkensnake, Tarpaulin Sky, Bombay Gin, and online at Conjunctions. Horse Less Press will release his new book, fabric, in February. He recently completed a translation of the Old Testament’s “Song of Songs” and continues to work on a sequence of writings that orbit Carlo Collodi’s wooden boy, Pinocchio.